Why John Still Can't Read...

More, the problem of English spelling...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWN9rTc08GU&feature=related

Mo is in the 4th grade and was completely taught with phonics. From what I understand no schools are using "whole word" to teach reading.

Those who have maintained the whole word system were not the progressives. In fact, the progressives battled the whole word system and out of their fights arose several methods of teaching grammar, spelling and reading.

However, sentence diagramming is no longer taught. I wish we would return to that method. I proposed a return on these boards several months ago and the righties jousted with me over that.

I specifically said that if one can not find the subject of a sentence, one can not know what the sentence, and the paragraph that contains the sentences, is about.

I'm not certain which of the righties here poo-pooed my statement because all of you tend to resemble each other.

I'd also love to see geography taught as a separate course beginning in the third grade. Geography is a good preparation for the teaching of history, political science, economics, biology and chemistry.

@ gunga

Thanks for alerting people to the existence of the dangerous author of the historically inaccurate post you presented. That was a real service.

With all the money that we spend on education, and with all of the schooling that we give our educators, we still cant get an answer as to how best to teach reading....or math...or science....or anything else for that matter. Maybe there is no answer, as different kids do better under different methods, but we certainly need to stop all of the instability in the schools by our constant changing of methods.

So, gunga, were you taught to read with Dick and Jane? The Dick and Jane primers were the whole word primers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_and_Jane

On money, teachers make terrible wages in many states, and parents everywhere throw fundraisers to buy books, equipment and supplies. Programs are cut to appease people who think arts are a waste. It goes on and on...

A few years back, when I was subbing, a parent cornered me after school to marshall my support for eliminating tracking at the high school. She was convinced the system wasted money.

I asked her whether she thought that without tracking, the school would need fewer teachers. She said no. Then I asked whether each student should have a text book. She said yes. So, I asked if tracking would change the number of text books purchased. She said no. Then I said that it looked like tracking wasn't costing more money.

I am a lefty, and I will poo-poo this. I have seen sentence diagramming as a complete waste of time since the time when it was forced on me in third grade.

You learn by doing. If you want to learn to comprehend written English, you read and discuss. If you want to learn to write, you write and get feedback.

The only thing sentence diagramming teaches is how to draw lines between words. I maintain this is a useless exercise. You can find the subject of a sentence without drawing these silly lines between words.

The problem with any discussion between "phonics" (whatever that means) and "whole language" (whatever that means) is that it is based on a flawed premise that humans can learn using one method over the other. The truth is that we learn something as important and complex as language using many different techniques.

Every human being who learns the English language learns how to sound out words. Every human being who learns the English language quickly learns sight words.

With all due respect, the idea that any child is taught to read "completely" with phonics is laughable. Such purity doesn't exist in an education setting, and if it did it would be a horrible thing.

I would also point out two other things that are generally ignored in these dogmatic discussion.

1) By far the most important predictor of education success is the wealth of the family. Rich kids tend to do well regardless of the teaching method. Poor kids tend to have problems regardless of the teaching method.

These political arguments about teaching dogma are really meaningless.

2) I am also deeply skeptical of the claims that American kids are falling behind. There are lots of people interested in proving this narrative, so they set up tests that always show American kids are falling behind. But there aren't objective tests showing any such trend.

American kids have supposedly been falling behind for the past 100 years. And these kids went to the moon, built new industries, discovered medicines and invented the Internet.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here, I've no info on this, and say that the greatest factor in teaching kids to read is reading to them at a young age.
You have to want to learn, introducing a child to the pleasures of the written word, at a young age, can do a lot to foster the desire to learn to read for ones self. I doubt that any particular teaching technique, fails or succeeds on merit alone.

And I have a hunch that these people tend to make money off of testing students.

I think "Freakonomics" disproved that theory: http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-05-03-parents-edit_x.htm

A teacher should be able to confirm but as i recall study shows that in order of importance

1) is coming from a home that is stable and secure (physically, emotionally, and financially) where education is valued by the parents

2) coming from a home where they have been exposed since birth to a large number of words. Vocabulary wires the brain by ways not yet understood, but a person who knows a lot of words usually has a well functioning brain.

Reading to your kid does both 1 and 2....however, you can walk into an amazing number of American homes and find almost no books.

Especially nowadays. Television and video games have taken over.
My mother read to me as a child, and we read chapters each day in school all the way to sixth grade, as I recall.
I would be interested to know how often Kipling gets read to kindergarten classes today.

I tried reading the "Just So" stories to Mo but had a hell of a time getting past all the "niggers" he threw around. I eventually gave up.

Sometimes not owning a lot of books simply means you're smart enough to own a library card.

I wonder if anyone has compared exposure to reading today and in earlier generations....my impression is that not only is less reading done, but that the books that are read have been greatly dumbed down from what the parents and grandparents read. There have been studies on text books which show that not only are they now written at a significantly lower grade level but there are also many fewer words in them, as the space has been taken up with graphics and blank paper. There is no reason to expect that English class is any different.

Another problem is that too many schools allow the students to get around reading the assignment..between cliff notes, movies and the internet a person can easily answer the superficial questions that are asked in the attempt to see if the reading was done. Teachers are aware that the reading assignments are often not done, but they dont seem to have any answer other than to beg.

Yeah the library is great too. My dad took us every week, those were good times I'll never forget. Guess you gotta do a little creative reading with some of the Kipling.